Noises off: the race to save Britain’s audio heritage
“Millions of unique recordings are at risk, ranging from music and radio to oral history and wildlife”
The British Library’s sound archive contains more than 6.5 million recordings – but many of its most fragile treasures are now under threat. Can they be rescued? William Atkins reports
Deep in a basement beneath the British Library in London, the lift doors open to a din like a ship’s engine room. “It gets a bit noisy here!” says Richard Ranft, the library’s head of sound and vision. The hubbub is coming from a network of conveyor belts hung from the ceiling, on which a red crate occasionally trundles past on its way up to the public reading rooms. A week before his retirement, Ranft has made time to come and find a tape recording that’s close to his heart – the call of a species of nocturnal monkey. Given that his leaving do took place last night and it’s 10.30am, he is in valiantly high spirits.
It’s not well-known among the British Library’s users that its 170 million items include sound recordings. The National Sound Archive, as it is known, comprises more than 6.5 million recordings, held on more than 1.8 million physical “carriers”, in no fewer than 42 different formats. These range from wax cylinder and shellac disc to MiniDisc and CD, as well as rarer formats such as dictation cassette and magnetic wire. Most of these items are held here in a three-storey facility under the main building in St Pancras.
Ranft’s retirement comes at a critical phase in the history of sound archiving. Much of the world’s audio heritage is at risk of becoming unlistenable within a few years – about 15, is the consensus – due to a combination of physical degradation and technical obsolescence. It’s as if the world had learnt that most books would shortly turn to dust. Much of Ranft’s 37-year career has been spent in a race to avert this silencing.
On 2 March 1905, the London Evening News published an anonymous letter making a seemingly left-field suggestion: that as well as collecting written works, the British Museum, as then owner of the nation’s “library of record”, should collect sound recordings (Edison’s phonograph was less than 30 years old). The museum replied that, under its funding agreement, only books and manuscripts could be acquired. Furthermore, the shellac records of the time were prone to wearing out, meaning any such archive would soon be obliterated by use. A solution came from the Gramophone Company, later of His Master’s Voice fame, which offered to donate the copper matrices – master discs – used to press records to the museum. Ranft shows me some of those 66 matrices, sealed in brass cases the size and shape of dinner plates.
It wasn’t until 1955 that the British Institute of Recorded Sound (BIRS) was established. It was the brainchild of Patrick Saul, a music enthusiast who had despaired at the sparsity of the British Museum’s sound collection, which, as late as 1925, held only a few dozen of the 100,000 records then in circulation. Saul had gone to listen to a particular recording of a sonata by Ernst von Dohnányi, which was no longer commercially available, only to be told that the museum didn’t have it, either. “Saul said it was like hearing about death for the first time as a child,” says Ranft. “The idea that these performances could just vanish!”
Ranft joined the BIRS in 1983 – a surprising career move for an ambitious young primatologist. He’d made his first tape only two years earlier, in the Brazilian Amazon, where he’d gone to look for so-called owl monkeys. He visited the BIRS to listen to a recording of the species deposited by another recordist. “I was asked if I could leave copies of my recordings. We got chatting and they said, ‘We need a bit of help.’” That year, the BIRS was finally integrated into the British Museum, as the National Sound Archive.
By 2015, the collection had been absorbed into the British Library, which was founded in 1973. Ranft, as head of the archive, helped launch Save Our Sounds, an eight-year programme to help preserve Britain’s sound heritage. Its initials suggest the urgency of its mission. As with any library, the sound archive’s value lies in its breadth and diversity: millions of unique recordings are at risk, ranging from music and radio to oral history and wildlife. One crucial strand of Save Our Sounds, an £18.8m project called Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, is tasked with preserving and digitising existing recordings – some 110,000 physical items from the library and 50,000 from regional collections, equating to around 470,000 individual recordings. “We went to the management and said, ‘If we carry on at this rate we’re at risk of losing parts of the collection,’” Ranft tells me.
The threats faced by sound archives are of three main kinds. First, carriers physically degrade, some faster than others. When a wax cylinder starts to crack, or magnetic tape degrades, little can be done to make it playable again. Second, the machinery required to play those carriers is cascading into obsolescence. More urgently, another kind of carrier is starting to vanish: audio engineers familiar with the ageing technology are themselves growing old.
The project digitised its 100,000th recording last April: a Nigerian blacksmith playing “hammer and anvil” music, in which the rhythms mimic those of Yoruba speech. Another recently digitised
recording is of Sir Francis Chichester from his yacht Gipsy Moth IV during his 1966-67 circumnavigation of the globe, speaking by radio to his wife. It’s three months since they have spoken and, while the recording is dominated by the exchange of details about the weather and his position, their pleasure at hearing one another’s voices is unmistakable. To date, Unlocking Our Sound Heritage has digitised more than 150,000 recordings – only a fraction of the library’s collection. Unlike film, there are few ways of expediting the process of digitising analogue audio. “At least with moving images,” Ranft explains, “you can have a freeze-frame... With sound, you simply have to play it back.”
As a medium, sound has not historically been accorded the same authority as the written word. Only recently did academic journals start to accept citations to sound recordings, for instance. This poor-relation status is explained partly by recorded sound’s relative newness. Edison’s phonograph was marketed in the early 20th century as a toy for the well-off. While sound recording has been used by researchers for almost as long as it has existed, oral historians would often record over tapes once they had been transcribed. Ranft winces at the loss. “The words carry so much more. The intonation, the emotion, things that are untranscribable.” He mentions the tape recordings of Nelson Mandela’s trial in Pretoria in 1964, in which the ANC leader gave a bravura speech in his own defence – how the transcripts fail to convey the conviction of Mandela’s voice, or the courtroom’s gasp when he declares the “ideal of a free and democratic society... is an ideal for which I am prepared to die”.
“The impression is one of infinite variety, as if every sound ever made might
be somewhere on these shelves”
We duck between shelves lined with recordings and Ranft pulls items out at random: a tape of
BBC radio segments from 1981; a wax cylinder of Weber’s
Invitation to the Waltz from 1902; a box of home recordings made by one A.W.E. Perkins between 1952 and 1970... The impression is one of infinite variety, as if every sound ever made might be somewhere on these shelves. I follow him as he searches for something. “It’s somewhere here...” Finally, he slides out a box, its label still attached, the recording he made in the Amazon nearly 40 years ago: Aotus nigriceps, black-headed night monkey.
Back at ground level, someone is hammering in fence posts – then there’s the sharp crunch of a snare drum, a loud tut, a hi-hat, a cap gun; then the hammering resumes, accelerating furiously. It sounds like a drummer going hell for leather in a disused warehouse. “This is one of the first recordings I heard when I started,” says Cheryl Tipp, the library’s wildlife sounds curator. “I didn’t think it was real!” I’m at a loss as to the extraordinary noises coming from the speakers either side of her desk, so she tells me: they are the underwater vocalisations of a male walrus.
Like Ranft, Tipp studied zoology, before starting work in the sound archive as a cataloguer. There are about a quarter of a million wildlife recordings here, of which some 8,000 have so far been digitised. Tipp continues to receive obsolete recordings from the public. “It’s very difficult to turn down anything,” she says. Her most recent acquisition is a collection of cassettes from the estate of British ornithologist Yvonne Malcolm-Coe, a pioneer in the study of the birds of Kenya during the 1950s and 1960s. Users of the collection today include a researcher studying song in female birds and another the classification of warblers. Not all the enquiries Tipp receives are so innocuous, however. Once, an American hunter requested a recording of an African big-game species to lure others of its kind. Tipp refused: she would not contribute to a species’ extinction. But the archive does include a small number of species humankind has already wiped out, including a Hawaiian songbird last heard in 1987: the Kaua’i O’o A’a – “the very, very last male” – singing for its mate, who died the previous year. “At least we’ve got his voice,” says Tipp. Hearing the bird, you can understand what she means when she says such recordings can move listeners to tears.
Behind the library’s main building is the British Sound Archive’s lab. There, Gavin Bardon, one of the audio engineers, is working to digitise a collection of thousands of shellac discs. The story behind the records is extraordinary. “Basically it’s full of Nazis,” he says. In the 1930s, Germany’s Reich Broadcasting Company recorded hundreds of radio broadcasts on shellac disc. All were lost during the Second World War, but in its aftermath, British investigators in Berlin located a pressing plant in which were some 4,500 of the metal matrices used for pressing the discs. From these, new shellac pressings were made – which in turn were requisitioned by prosecutors at the 1945 Nuremberg war crimes trials. Their contents, which include speeches by Hitler, have been drawn on by researchers in Germany, but much of the material remains unheard.
The most endangered items in the archive resemble chocolatedipped toilet-roll tubes. “It feels a bit like a crayon,” says Robert Cowlin, another of the engineers. He’s holding a brown-wax cylinder, an early counterpart to the record. “Mould will literally eat away at the recording,” explains Adam Tovell, the head of technical services for sound and vision, “because there’s tasty organic material there to feast on. And that’s it, gone.” Slotting the cylinder into a 1902 phonograph, Cowlin cranks the handle. Silence; then from the phonograph’s black horn comes the respirator hiss of the rotating cylinder, followed by a spoken introduction magicked from its grooves, like someone announcing a dignitary’s arrival at a ball: “The Lass o’ Killiecrankie, sung by Harry Lauder…” and Lauder’s crackling, vaudeville lament from the faraway room that is 1904 – “Oh, years ago, I used to be the smartest chap as you would see…” It’s precisely what a listener, still glamoured by the miracle of recorded sound, would have heard 116 years ago.
Richard Ranft, a few days short of retirement, arrives with a copy of the recording he found. The twin speakers either side of Cowlin’s desk start to hiss, as Ranft’s youthful voice introduces the recording, and then, like a wave hitting, the room is filled with the billion-voiced shriek of the rainforest at night. We each assume an expectant attitude: ears cocked, gazes turned inward – Ranft’s towards his memory of that night on Brazil’s Jutaí River in 1981. Then there it is, nothing dramatic, just a muted double woof like a nervous owl. Night monkey. “I can picture it!” he says. “I’m not in a studio in London... I’m there.”
It is, as Cheryl Tipp put it earlier: “Just a record of a living thing that lived on this planet.” But at that moment it doesn’t seem fanciful to think of the National Sound Archive itself as rainforest-like in its vulnerability and diversity – from the Kaua’i O’o A’a to The Lass o’ Killiecrankie – and the work of Ranft and Tipp and their colleagues as resembling that of the zoologists they trained to be: to itemise what’s there, to describe and catalogue it, to identify that which is most imperilled and to try to keep it from extinction.
A longer version of this article appeared in the FT Magazine. © Financial Times Ltd 2020. To listen to a selection from the British Library’s extensive collections of sound, visit sounds.bl.uk.